Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars

Game review

Keen is a normal little boy. He lives with his parents in a family house, reads a lot of comics in his free time and has a space rocket in the hut behind the house. Well, maybe she's a little smarter (keen in English). One day an unpleasant thing will happen to him. The disgusting green UFOs are preparing to attack in order to take control of the Earth, and their strategic planning center will evaluate that in order for the occupation to be successful, the greatest potential threat must be eliminated. Not nuclear weapons. Keena. They kidnap such a nice Keen and land him on the planet. Just to be on the safe side, he scatters all the necessary components from his rocket (toaster xxxx) over the planet's surface. But Keen gets angry and is determined to show him what an elbow is. And at this moment, you become Keen.

Technical side: The graphics may be average for their year, but for the purposes of the arcade it is richly sufficient. The controls are cool, reasonably demanding, but not enough to make your fingers knot. You'd better turn off the music, but the sounds are within the norm.

To the point: Commander Keen impressed the player with not so precise design as his addictiveness. Yes, it's the state where at 22:22 you say to yourself, "One more level and I'll go to sleep." and at 0:54 your tired eyes will get lost again for hours. Keen number one is quite small, it can be passed in a few tens of minutes, but it outlines another, much longer and also better sequel, and with its unpretentiousness it rather introduces players to the game. There are few types of obstacles and monsters, but what I have to attribute to the authors for the good is the great design of the levels for their time. From short and easy levels, the difficulty increases, so Keen is one of the games that children talk about at school and beat each other, who passed the level as the fastest and who wins it first. I must definitely add to the pros that the game cannot be saved during missions, only between them. In addition to the classic foot hopping, Keen is also equipped with a pogo rod (for the uninitiated - a rod with a spring and two climbs at the bottom - you stand up and hop), which is more difficult to control, and also a blaster for eliminating uncomfortable monsters. When Keen gathers all his parts from the desperate Emzas and returns home, he discovers that the Emzac mothership is anchored in Earth orbit and the invasion begins ... So he has no choice but to take the pogo stick and the fate of humanity into his own hands. See you at Commander Keen II. 

Reviewed by Anonym – 1. april 2014